Program

The Long Journey

Screenig of
this film is a part of the multimedia project "Shoah in Us" - more info here

The
Long Journey (Daleká cesta ), directed
by Alfréd Radok, 1948, 108 min.
The Long Journey is something of a legend in the Czech Republic, and even
during the 40-year period for which it was banned it remained in the Czech
collective consciousness as one of the country's film masterpieces. (Václav
Havel, for example, wrote some important analytical essays on Radok's work in
the 1960s and also penned a very impressive obituary when the director died in
1976).

It
was well-received internationally at the time and is to the present day the
definitive Czech Holocaust film, even in comparison with later classics such as
Jan Němec's Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night, 1964) and Ján
Kadár and Elmar Klos's Oscar-winning Obchod na korze (The Shop on the
High Street, 1965).

The plot of this cinematic work of art is very personal. Alfréd Radok (1917
-1976) was himself only half Jewish, but he lost a large part of his family to
the concentration camps in the Second World War. His father and his grandfather
died in a transit camp-the ghetto town of Terezín (Theresienstadt), where part
of Daleká cesta takes place.

Radok
was himself imprisoned in the last months of the war in the detention camp of
Klettendorf near Wrocław, from which he managed to escape. Daleká cesta
was his first film, started only three years after the tragic events of the
Holocaust that affected his family so much. He shot the film partly in Prague's
Barrandov film studios and partly on location in Terezín—for him a very
difficult and painful experience.

Daleká cesta was filmed at a very difficult and dark time:
in the autumn and winter of 1948 to 1949. The totalitarian Communist regime in
postwar Czechoslovakia had just come to power (in February 1948) and Radok's
film was one of the last expressions of cultural freedom for a long time to
come. At that time, however, this freedom was already limited by new censorship
and this fact influenced the final shape of the film.
More info about Daleká cesta